Sharon Horgan Was Still Angry
So she made more Bad Sisters.
“The show is a good vehicle for subject matter that feels really, horribly, constantly timely. The second season came along when the bad choices of bad men are impacting our lives. Here we have a group of women who just won’t put up with that.” Photo: Apple TV+/Copyrighted
The last time I spoke to Sharon Horgan, the first season of Bad Sisters had just concluded and the creator, writer, and actress was hesitant to discuss the possibility of a second. “You would have to have a really good reason to bring it back,” she said in 2022. “I would never do it just for the sake of it.” Cut to two years later, and once again, I’m on a Zoom call with Horgan to talk about Bad Sisters, which she found plenty of good reasons to bring back for season two. The narrative kicks into gear at the end of the second episode, when Grace (Anne-Marie Duff) — the most vulnerable Garvey sister, who murdered her abusive husband in season one — dies in a car accident. Did the newest characters in the sisters’ orbit, Grace’s charming new husband, Ian (Owen McDonnell), or her annoying new friend, Angelica (Fiona Shaw) — have something to do with the tragedy?
After a season of pratfalls, break-ins, and quite a lot of grieving, the finale reveals all. Right before her death, Grace confessed to Ian that she killed her first husband. In turn, her new husband — who’s been a gambling-addicted con man the whole time — blackmails her, agitating Grace so much that she ultimately runs her car off the road. When Eva (Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Bibi (Sarah Greene), and Becka (Eve Hewson) gather to confront him, Angelica, ever in the wrong place at the wrong time, nearly bludgeons him to death with a golf club. A series of hilarious near calamities ensue: the sisters attempting to dispose of Ian’s body; Ian somehow falling off a cliff, then somehow surviving that fall; Detective Houlihan (Thaddea Graham) discovering the Garveys’ involvement in Ian’s injuries, then colluding with former detective Loftus (Barry Ward) to threaten Ian, himself a former officer, in a way that ensures he will never mess with the Garveys again. The season ends on yet another decisive note, with all the sisters and their partners together as a family, spreading Grace’s ashes in a scene that suggests they are starting to move on, even as they hold their sister close in their memory. Let’s see what Horgan has to say this time.
When you and I talked after the first-season finale, you indicated there could maybe be a season two. At what point did you start seriously thinking about what that could look like?
They started talking about season two as we were editing season one. I actually had an idea for season two as we were filming, but it wasn’t something I thought we would do at all. Then Apple was really keen to do more. I said to Apple, “I’ll do a writers’ room.” I knew I had an idea for a portion of it, and I’ll see if it feels like we can capture the tone of the original and actually say something worth saying.
The idea being?
The idea I had filming season one was, What if lightning struck twice to a woman who has been so isolated for so long and full of shame and had kept a secret from her sisters for so long about what she was going through? Would she be able to ask for help? And would her sisters believe her?
When I was researching season one and looking into women who’ve been in those desperate situations and terrible, abusive relationships, if they’ve come out the other side, they don’t always meet Mr. Right. They’re damaged and vulnerable and open to someone taking advantage. The idea was that, if it happened again, how would she cope and what would she do and how would the family react?
There was so much stuff I was still angry about that I have an opportunity to talk about and explore through these characters, like the sexist institution that is the police and how they deal with people like Grace. That old boys’ club contains so many bad, bad people. The show is a good vehicle for subject matter that feels really, horribly, constantly timely. In the first season, it was like, Oh, fucking hell, it’s come along at this time where we get to have some sort of group catharsis. Then the second season came along when the bad choices of bad men are impacting our lives. Here we have a group of women who just won’t put up with that.
Was there a specific moment in the writers’ room when you realized this was going to work?
There were probably a few points where that happened. You get excited about story all the time but then you lose confidence.
We were scared about the Grace story line. It was something we went back and forth on a bit: Can you continue to have the tone of the show when one of the main characters dies?
Did you know Grace would die going into the writers’ room or was that something you figured out in there?
That was something we figured out pretty early on. In fact, someone suggested it and I was like “no.” Then the more we talked about how it could continue for a season, taking it to such a brutal place felt like what it needed to operate in the way the show needs to operate. But it was when we decided on Ian and Eva getting together — that’s when I thought, I think this is going to work. That didn’t mean it wasn’t scary. Someone who’s as strong, as smart, and as on it as Eva — how could a woman like that find herself in that situation?
I’ll tell you what, in looking into those kinds of narcissists who wheedle their way into multiple women’s lives, they’re not stupid women. The idea of Eva in her grief becoming almost as vulnerable as Grace at that point when he targeted her, I got excited about that because Eva was always looking for love. In her grief for Grace, in order to fill that terrible hole in her heart, this man comes along and offers her protection and love and to shoulder the burden.
Oh, and the second one was Angelica — making her, you know, almost a heroine in the end.
When you were developing Angelica as a character, did you have Fiona Shaw in mind?
Yeah. It’s much easier to write when you have someone who not only feels like the character, but that you know is gonna bring it on so many different levels. You have other potentials because you bring in casting quite early and they send you lists. Also, you don’t know if you’re gonna get her. I mean I was sure we weren’t gonna get her, but she was a fan of the show.
Angelica developed even more once Fiona came onboard because this is how it is with great actors: They’re not just great on the screen; they do an awful lot of headwork for you. They get to know their characters really well, and they also have opinions on why they are who they are.
I found that character so fascinating, not only because of the way Fiona Shaw plays her but because the Garvey sisters are so judgmental of her because she is judgmental. You realize ultimately that, aside from the fact that she almost killed someone with a cricket bat, she’s generally harmless.
A hundred percent. The only thing I’ll correct you on is camogi stick. It’s an Irish sport called hurling, but the girls’ version of it is called camogi. It is fucking dangerous. I played it as a youngster, and my sister lost her tooth. The fact that it ends up becoming the murder weapon is one of my favorite things.
Angelica’s 100 percent the decoy villain. She had to be someone who is full of hurt and anger and uses the Grace information really badly and gets carried away with it. In their grief, the Garvey sisters are looking for a place to be angry. It gets out of control, and they’re paranoid and afraid.
After Angelica hits Ian over the head, she doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what she’s just done. Her explanation is, “I just didn’t like what he was saying about Grace.” What is it about Grace that captivates her?
There’s so much we cut out that answers that. It’s here and there, you know. She talks about how “we spent hours making an unholy amount of lasagna together.” They did the whole Meals on Wheels thing. In Grace, she found a confidante and someone who actually listened for the first time. When women get to that age, they are invisible. This is such an obvious thing that’s been said a million times, but no one gives a shit about what they have to say about anything. Grace did, and listened to her, and talked to her and then it got to be too much. It was suffocating. That’s exactly around the time Ian came onto the scene and swept her off her feet and she fell in love and nothing else mattered. Initially, when Angelica finds out what Grace did to JP, she wants to help her and she wants to protect her, but she also wants to use it to be that friend who is everything. She just takes it too far.
It’s very funny when Angelica throws herself at the mercy of the police and is like, “Take me, because God will forgive me. He’s not gonna forgive the Garveys.” It’s self-sacrifice that has all this terrible judgment baked into it.
How funny is Fiona Shaw, though? When we were filming it she was cracking us all up. On the day, I was like, We have to have her fuck it up even more for them. I was like, “Ask the police if it’s still going to be attempted murder.”
That wasn’t in the original script?
No, no. It was just something we thought of on the day. And oh my God, she is, like, hurling herself to the ground. You do those takes time after time after time, and it was just no bother to her. She got it and she was all in and she couldn’t have had more of a blast.
She’s very Method, right? But not in a Method way that you associate with Pacino or De Niro. In episode two, she cycles up to the house and she’s looking in the window. This is post her finding out that Grace murdered her husband. So she’s looking in this window and it’s like she’s seeing everything for the first time and everything she thought about Grace has been turned on its head. Dearbhla Walsh, who is our series director, goes, “Do you think Angelica’s been here before?” And Fiona’s like, “No, I don’t think she’s been here before. I don’t think she’s ever had so much as a cup of tea in this house.” She’ll fully commit to the story of the character within the scene, and talks it through with you as Angelica. It’s fascinating.
I want to talk about the almost-murder sequence where Ian has gotten hit, and then there’s a knock at the door, and then it turns out to be the police. That’s what the show does so well: escalate, escalate, escalate. Was that all written already or were you discovering some things on the day?
I was on edge the whole day because there was so much to do. There’s stunts and there’s black eyes to put on and blood to figure out. Everything was worked out and choreographed before and rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed to get all those moments right. That is the kind of stuff I love. I find that stuff easier to write than, I don’t know what you’d call it — traditional thriller moments. I like the escalation of panic. And I like hearing people say stupid things at the wrong time. Like when they’re trying to figure out if it’s a delivery and Eva’s like, “Oh, could be bath towels.” There was so much in the scene we couldn’t really end up showing because you have to get so tight in the edit in the end. But what they put down to cover up the blood, there was a welcome mat and some ridiculous things. But all of it, very heavily written and plotted.
It’s funny that when the blood pours out of Ian’s wound, it only goes in the grout between the tiles on the kitchen floor, which is the most impossible thing to clean. And of course a woman’s going to have to do it eventually. Was that in the script?
No, it wasn’t. It was a beautiful accident. It was our second go and it just did that. We were really disappointed with how the blood dispersed in the first one. Then the second one — I found it so hard to stay in character because I was watching the river, and was like, Oh my God, it almost looks like a cross. We were just like, “Thank you to the special-effects gods.”
You mentioned that you had to cut some scenes. Which ones were you particularly heartbroken to lose?
Episode ones are really tricky because you’ve got to get to the meat of the story. As much as I love the sisters just being sisters together, we need to introduce Angelica, we need to pull that suitcase with JP’s dad’s remains in it out of the water, we need to get the story moving. But oh my God, we had like a fucking 300-minute cut of that wedding.
There was this scene with Joe and Becka, you know when they wake up in the bunk bed? He’s saying, “They like me though, don’t they, your sisters?” They have that little bounce and he pulls her back into bed and we cut there. There’s this beautiful bit of dialogue between them after that. Becka says to him — you know, he’s so into her — “Have you never had good sex before?” He has this mini-monologue where he’s like. “I’m the only lad from my village without an underbite. So I got plenty of action, let me tell you that.” Then he goes into this whole spiel about what it means to be with someone you’re mad about. It was so beautiful. It was such a moment to introduce this non-Matt man. But you know, fuck it. He made his presence felt — you get little glimpses of him. He’s so great and funny. But I felt really sad about that cause they were so beautiful together.
The five Garveys, clockwise from top left: Bibi (Sarah Greene), Becka (Eve Hewson), Eva (Sharon Horgan), Ursula (Eva Birthistle), and Grace (Anne-Marie Duff). Photo: Apple TV+
By killing off Grace so early, you remove her from much of the season, too. How did you break that news to Anne-Marie Duff and how did she respond?
Oh, Anne-Marie knew from the off. She was completely involved and loved the story line. She also loved that, in episode eight, we get to see what happened that night. Obviously you think it’s possibly Angelica on that phone, blackmailing her, but you don’t know. The thing is she told me that when she was watching season one, she always felt quite isolated from all of us because 90 percent of her scenes were with Claes Bang. It used to feel kind of weird that we were all over there doing something else. Then she watched the show and she felt the presence of Grace constantly. Like the scene in episode one of season one, when we’re sitting at the Forty Foot and we look and there is a space and she’s not there. I mean, she’d read the scripts but hadn’t realized how felt her absence was to those sisters. I think it’s the same in season two. She’s constantly there.
I was really nervous about the portrayal of grief. One, because I didn’t want to turn it into a tear fest where everyone’s just depressed all the time, because that’s not going to work. Two, because I wanted it to be authentic and I didn’t want to brush over it. The fact that they’re trying to find out what happened for her memory is the thing that sort of drives them. But they couldn’t be breaking down and crying all the time. There’s so many moments where that happened organically, like in that sauna. Having experienced grief really recently myself — my dad died mid-filming of the season — that is how grief works. You hate yourself for getting on with life, but life just moves you along and then all of a sudden you’re slapped across the face with it. It felt like an easier thing to write and perform and work through because I felt like, “no, this is how you do it.” You still laugh with your brothers and sisters. I mean, at the worst possible times, me and my brothers and sisters were laughing, and then destroyed, and then back laughing again, because there’s no other way through it.
Narratively, it seems like a great tool in a way. As you know, when you’re grieving, you’re not in your right mind all the time.
Exactly, yes! That’s the thing. That’s why I feel like we get away with so much of the Angelica stuff, because that’s exactly what it is. They’ve lost their minds. Grief has fucked with their reasoning. And the same with Ian and Eva. It’s ruined her ability to think straight. That’s something she would never have done if she wasn’t going through that.
It also struck me in the finale that it’s the women who help each other, ultimately. Una, the female cop, is the one who really presses to protect the Garvey sisters from Ian. Angelica is willing to throw herself at God’s mercy for them.
Absolutely, they are looking out for each other. I thought about Blánaid throughout — my daughters were so angry with me that I did that to her. But we gave hints of it in season one. We never wanted to blatantly show her seeing anything terrible, but we wanted to hint that she may have heard a lot more than we showed. The fact that she knew her father was a bad man and that her mother’s legacy is the great young woman she will be — when they are all together at the end, I hope that it feels like they are a family. They’re still a strong and protective family and nothing’s gonna change that.
Your daughters were mad at you? For what specifically?
For leaving Blánaid without parents. They were really upset about that.
How did you calm them down?
I didn’t, really. They didn’t talk to me for a while. I just said, “Look, you just have to keep watching. I think everything will be okay.” I mean, it’s never gonna be okay, but — ah, they’ll get over it. You try writing a bloody series, see how you get on.
Is there room for a season three? Because, you know, Ian’s not dead.
[Laughs] That’s so funny. He’s not dead. When I was thinking about the potential, that was the thing that I thought, His situation with his wife and is there anything there? But I just feel like I was so happy with the ending. I felt so at peace with where they were. I feel like it’s done.
What if Apple’s like, “Please, Sharon, make a season three?” What would you say?
[Long pause.]
You’re not sure.
I don’t know, I’m so tired. I mean, that’s my problem. I thought it would be easier this time. I was like, I’ll do it again, but I’m not gonna do ten episodes. I’ll do eight. I come from the U.K. world of six half-hours. You shoot it over seven weeks, you know? But this is like, when you’re writing it, and showrunning it, and in it, and then you’re in the edit, it is two and a half years of your life or something like that. Eight didn’t make it any easier. Somehow it was almost the same.
We were talking earlier about the perpetual timeliness of a story like this. But especially right now to watch the end of this season and watch a man actually face consequences for what he’s done — certainly in America at the moment, it feels like that just doesn’t happen. I don’t know if you’ve thought about it in that context since you made it, but is there something cathartic about watching it now?
When we did our premiere in New York, I felt incredibly emotional because you’re showing it to people for the first time, but also it was not long after the election results. It is a wish fulfillment thing. In a way, that’s what I was trying to do with this. I was trying to hold people to account and to show that good people can affect change.
With the police element, you’re holding a system to account, not just one person.
It was such a swing and you never know if people will even recognize it or see it or get onboard with it. When you asked earlier about, were there moments within the room where you thought, I think we’ve got something here. It was the Eva-Ian thing, and it was a few other moments. But I remember leaving the writers’ room and going home and calling executive producer Faye Dorn and saying, “It’s the cops. It’s that institution.” There are bigger things we all need to get angry about. Let’s do that through these characters.
Yellowjackets Episode 307 Recap: WTF (What the Frogs)
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Mar 21, 2025SHAREFavorite
WELCOME TO YOUR YELLOWJACKETS 307 RECAP. I AM WRITING THIS INTRO IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE THIS IS ONE OF THE WILDEST EPISODES OF TELEVISION I’VE EVER SEEN (COMPLIMENTARY) AND I FEEL LIKE I’M STILL COMING DOWN FROM IT. Okay, I’ll stop for now. Below, find a painstaking breakdown of all things “Croak,” written by Alisha Brophy and Ameni Rozsa and directed by Jennifer Morrison. Can’t wait to chat in the comments! If your comment includes spoilers, just include a few non-spoiler sentences at the beginning so they don’t appear in the recent comments box on the homepage. Read past recaps! Take my Yellowjackets personality quiz! Let’s fucking gooooooo!
Heading into “Croak,” I wondered how it might sit with the shocking cliffhanger of last episode. Would we move down into a lower register to allow for a breather? Would we match “Thanksgiving (Canada)”‘s scream? “Croak” offers a brief respite in its prelude, a deft turning of the dial to tell a completely different story in a completely different tone, driving home the fact that the difference between humor and horror often comes down to context. After that, “Croak” doesn’t merely match the energy of last week’s post-Ben barbaric yawp. It turns up the volume, yielding one of the most bonkers episodes of television I’ve ever seen that still strikingly feels grounded in the world constructed by the show. I basically watched the entire thing with my jaw on the floor.
The episode opens by answering one of the season’s pressing questions: What the fuck is up with those wild ass sounds in the wilderness? The answer? Fucking frogs. As in literally frogs that are fucking. I live in central Florida and can verify I’ve often described the chorus of sounds of mating frogs as “screaming.” If I’d been malnourished and isolate for a long period of time like the Yellowjackets, I’d probably interpret those screams as even more ominous, too. The episode begins three days before the Yellowjackets are discovered dancing and screaming around Ben’s head on a spike, the first time Yellowjackets has employed this particular time device. We see close-ups of the frogs and their titular sounds. They’re being studied by a pair of scientists, a couple named Edwin and Hannah, played by Nelson Franklin and Ashley Sutton. They’re accompanied by Kodiak, a comically serious and gruff crossbow-toting wilderness guide who likes to suck on cigarettes while leaning against trees.
Kodi kills a rabbit for the trio to eat. Edwin tends to his torn up feet, the result of wearing too-small shoes, so Kodi asks Hannah to fetch the plates. As she’s walking back, Kodi takes off his outer layer to reveal muscles bulging out from a tank top. Hannah literally trips from ogling him. This is so fun! Mere miles away from the Yellowjackets and their world is this other, smaller, lower stakes diorama of drama between three people. My wife often talks about how the difference between humor and horror can be just the slightest turn of the wheel. Set the trailer to The Shining to different music with new narration, for example, and you’ve got a wacky family comedy. Yellowjackets often excels at these tonal shifts and bending its own genre. But this little prelude with Hannah, Edwin, and Kodiak is an overt example of that turning of the dial. A toxic love triangle between two scientists and a mystery man! All happening in the Yellowjackets’ figurative backyard!
“The wilderness provides,” Kodi says about the barbecued rabbit. These words in a new context take on a comical cadence rather than a haunting one as it does when any of the Yellowjackets say something like it.
Later in the tent, Hannah tries to get Kodiak to answer some personal questions, but he remains elusive. He tells one of Aesop’s fables: “The Frogs Who Desired a King,” of the frogs who prayed to Zeus to send them a king. Zeus sent them a heron, who killed the frogs. It’s a fitting tale in the context of the Yellowjackets, who are desperate for a leader, an Antler Queen. But that leadership only ever leads to death.
Kodiak admits he doesn’t know anything about frogs but a thing or two about horticulture. Weed. He’s talking about weed. He produces a joint, and the three proceed to get high in their tent in the rain while “Fly” by Sugar Ray plays. They talk about the frogs they’re studying, who manage to stay frozen before waking up to have a big ol’ orgy. This suggests they’re studying wood frogs, who spend the winter frozen. Edwin says something about the “arctic banshee frog,” but I can’t find any information on if this is an actual species.
Edwin has the idea to call Miss Cleo, the call-in psychic from the late 90s. He’s just kidding, but Hannah wants to do it for real. They struggle over the satellite phone until the antenna snaps. “This is our lifeline!” Edwin laments. “Relax,” Kodi says. “I’m your lifeline.”
Now it’s THE DAY the trio discovers the Yellowjackets. But first, Hannah and Edwin bicker about Kodi mere feet behind him. Kodi seems amused by it. Edwin says to Hannah that Kodi could rob and murder them and no one would ever know it. Little do they know, Kodi isn’t the danger lurking in these woods. “You’re smitten,” Edwin says when he clocks the way Hannah looks at Kodi. The camera pulls back from the group and settles on a tree where the symbol is written.
At night, Edwin is still on one about trying to prove Kodi isn’t who he says he is. Edwin smells fire and thinks they should go check it out. “Wouldn’t recommend it,” Kodi says. “This far from civilization?” Edwin doesn’t care. He wants to go check it out. Hannah and Kodi go with.
And, well, we know what happens next. The trio hears the girls screaming from a distance at first. Then Hannah starts recording, and we hear the beginning of the DAT tape that’ll be played by Shauna, Tai, and Van in the future. When Lottie sees the group, she shouts “NO!!” We end on Edwin’s “what the fuck?” from last episode’s ending, and then Van exclaims in disbelief “we’re going home.” Cut to theme song.
When we return to this fraught scene at camp, Hannah apologizes and says they didn’t mean to interrupt and are just leaving. Her instincts are clearly telling her to run. Misty tries to say Ben died of natural causes. Edwin seems to piece together who they are, but then Hannah’s instincts are confirmed by what happens next: Lottie axes Edwin in the back of the head, and he collapses.
“Holy shit,” Shauna says, glee all over her face. “Lottie, what did you do?” Nat asks. “They don’t belong,” Lottie says. “It doesn’t want them here.”
Kodi tells Hannah to run, so they do. Nat yells at the others to bring them back alive, but the way they’re suiting up and making animal sounds suggests they’re prepared to hunt not gather. Kodi shoots his crossbow and hits Melissa in the shoulder. She begs for Shauna not to leave her, but Shauna tasks Mari with taking care of her: “She dies, you die,” she tells Mari. Nat instructs them all to clean up the Edwin scene because they don’t know who else could be coming. It’s sheer chaos.
In present day, Shauna sits on the toilet and listens to the DAT tape, hearing the moment when Edwin was struck by Lottie. But then she skips through the tape and lands on a part where Hannah talks to someone about how she wants them to be proud of her, not just see her as some mom who had a teenage pregnancy. So, it sounds like Hannah has/had a kid. We’ll circle back to this.
Shauna tells Jeff to stop spending time in the lobby, because circumstances have changed. She, meanwhile, is heading out. Jeff laments that she’s able to do whatever she wants while he just has to stay put. “I appreciate that secrecy, that’s your love language,” Jeff says. That’s not a love language, Jeff!
“I don’t deserve you, you know,” Shauna says before asking him to do something for her. She wants him to keep an eye on Callie. Shauna doesn’t know that Callie already has access to the tape. She’s also listening from the other side of the door while she searches the web for Unsolved Missing Persons + Canada + 1990s. She’s certainly not backing the fuck off like Shauna wants her to.
At the hotel where they’re staying, Van watches over a sleeping Tai, clearly still unnerved from Tai’s outburst in the middle of the night. Misty fucking Quigley then barges in unannounced, prompting Van to grab a…butter knife as a weapon. Misty drops the info that Tai met with Lottie the day she died. “You did?” Van asks. Tai says she met up with her to have a private conversation and that it doesn’t mean she murdered her.
Misty brings up that Tai has a history of “doing crazy shit and not even knowing about it.” Tai drops that it’s obvious whoever sent Shauna the tape murdered Lottie, but this is the first Misty is hearing of the tape.
Back in the chaos of the wilderness, Hannah and Kodi are running, the girls in close pursuit. Hannah wants to head back to camp, but Kodi points out they’re as good as dead if they do that and that if she wants to survive she’ll have to actually rely on her instincts. “Stick with me or you’re on your own!” he says, before splitting off. Hannah runs another way.
The girls run and growl, caw, snarl. Nat breaks up the group. They’re treating this like a sport, strategizing as if it were a soccer game. A chunk of Hannah’s hair gets caught on a tree. She ducks behind a log and starts recording the message Shauna will later hear, a message for her “sweet baby Alex.”
In the present, Shauna’s intercepted by Tai, Van, and Misty. She tells them there was more on the tape than just what Lottie did. Shauna, struggling initially to call Hannah by name, informs the group that she had a daughter who has clearly gotten ahold of the tape and is now out to punish them for what they did. Shauna wants to go stop her. Van asks her what she plans to do with her, and Shauna sarcastically says she’s going to sit her down and have a calm conversation with her. Van says they’re going with her, to Richmond, Virginia, where Shauna has apparently tracked down this Alex. This impresses Misty greatly. A new citizen detective has been born!
It’s time for a road trip! Shauna plays the rest of the tape for the group. Misty points out there was no mention of any offspring in Hannah’s obituary, but Shauna says it’s because it was a teenage pregnancy where the child was then adopted. Misty wonders why they didn’t know about the kid in the first place. “Someone did,” Van points out. Someone, after all, would have had to have gotten that tape to her. Tai says that Gen and Melissa got pretty close to Hannah, but Van points out they’re both dead. So, that’s that! It seems as if Hilary Swank As Melissa hints were a red herring. Melissa is dead. Perhaps there are no additional survivors after all. It seems much more likely now that Hilary Swank is playing this Alex character.
Misty wonders why this Alex woman would wait 25 years to enact her revenge. I have the same question!
While they stop for gas, Van confronts Tai and asks if she was ever going to tell her about going to see Lottie. Tai says she went to see Lottie to ask her to clarify more about what she meant when she said “it” was pleased for them after Nat died. “You promise you didn’t do it?” Van asks, and Tai does not answer.
Tai and Van come across Edwin, Hannah, and Kodi’s camp. They hear something in one of the tents, but it’s just a frog rattling in a jar. Van frees it and says “you’re okay, you’re free.” It’s ironic in the context of the fact that they could be free, too, if they weren’t busy hunting their way out of here. They find the satellite phone, and Van frantically tries to dial her mom. They seem, suddenly, so young again, like the boys discovered at the end of Lord of the Flies abruptly reconciling with their own youth and innocence again.
Akilah and Travis are looking through the woods together. Akilah says Lottie must have had a good reason to kill Edwin, like having a vision he was a bad guy or something. Misty approaches them and has an idea: They can corner Kodi at the “shit ridge.” Travis suggests they split up, so he and Akilah go left while Misty goes right. Travis fires a few shots to through Kodi off, and Hannah assumes it’s Kodi being shot. Shauna finds the chunk of Hannah’s hair on a branch and pockets it. Nat finds one of Hannah’s footprints, and Shauna takes out her knife.
Hannah slowly emerges and asks them not to hurt her. Nat says it’ll be okay, but Shauna of course grabs her and holds her knife against her, accusing her of shooting an arrow through Melissa. Hannah says it wasn’t her, that she has no weapons, that it was the guide they hired. Nat and Van come across them, too, and Nat tries to deescalate the whole situation. Shauna says they can still get rescued without leaving any witnesses. When a search party is sent looking for the scientists, they’ll find the Yellowjackets. Her plan is…short-sighted to say the least. Hannah says she knows where there’s first aid supplies to help Melissa. She has her leverage.
In the present Misty finds a receipt for the Lincoln tunnel in Shauna’s car and pockets it. She gets a call from Walter, who tells her the DNA results from under Lottie’s nails match the hair he took from Shauna’s hat. He thinks Shauna is Lottie’s murderer. I’m still wondering if a DNA match could also indicate it was Callie! Misty frantically texts Tai and Van that Shauna killed Lottie. They’re all trapped in the car together, wondering if they’re being driven around by a murderer.
“Okay, what the fuck is going on?” Shauna asks. She makes them tell her what the fuck is going on, but before they can, Van coughs up a bunch of blood.
In the wilderness, Misty screeches while running and is almost crossbowed by Kodi. When she ducks, she loses her glasses. If we’re sticking with the Lord of the Flies comparisons for this episode, it’s like when Piggy’s glasses are stolen.
Akilah and Travis indeed corner Kodi at the cliff, and Travis aims his gun at him. “Save your bullet,” Kodi says, implying he’s going to let go and crash to his death. But they tell him to stop and help him up. “Take us back with you,” Travis says.
The women rush Van to the hospital. Tai tells the front desk she has metastatic cancer, and this is the first Misty and Shauna are hearing of it. Tai pretends to be her wife so she can go in with her. Shauna says it seems so unfair that Van has cancer, and Misty tells her to stop pretending to care, accusing her of killing Lottie. Shauna is unfazed by Misty revealing the DNA match, pointing out Lottie stayed with her so naturally would have some of her DNA on her. Based on Shauna’s reactions, I genuinely don’t think she killed Lottie. I’m all in on the Callie theory at the moment. But I also know people clocked Jeff’s indifference to the reveal Lottie was killed last episode. Is it possible he’s helping cover up for his daughter? Would he be wiling to take the blame? Past behavior indicates yes!
Shauna abandons the others at the hospital. She clearly wants to finish off the job she started.
In the hospital, Tai sits with Van. She makes an under-her-breath comment about wanting to kill the guy who is screaming in the bed next to them, and Van clutches her hand and says “don’t.” Van isn’t sure what Tai is capable of, especially if Tai thinks that sacrificing someone could save her. Van closes her eyes and hears teen Lottie saying “take a breath, now what do you hear?” We slip into a dreamstate where Adult Van encounters her teenage self. “We never actually cheated death,” Teen Van says. “It was always an even trade.” Teen Van sets fire to Van’s hospital bed. The way they’ve been engulfing Van in fire so much this season really does suggest she had something to do with the cabin fire. When she wakes up in her hospital room, she sees Tai as Other Tai, mouth covered in dirt. “Don’t worry,” she says. “I won’t let them take your eyes.”
Day breaks out in the wilderness, and Gen and Mari are trying to get the arrow out of Melissa. Lottie is bent over Edwin’s dead body, spreading his blood on their face. Gen and Mari realize they have to push the arrow through. Lottie asks to help, but Gen points out she has done enough. “Those strangers, they were going to ruin everything,” Lottie says. “Go fuck your blood-dirt, Lottie,” Mari responds.
They push the arrow through Melissa and extract it. We see the same shot of Lottie’s face covered in blood that appears in “Did Tai Do That?” Shauna, Tai, Van, and Nat show up back at camp with Hannah in tow. “Hi, I’m Hannah,” she says, clearly alarmed.
Callie walks in on Jeff inspecting the bed for bedbugs. She tells him that they keep telling themselves Shauna is a good person and that all the bad things that happen to her couldn’t be helped. “What if she’s actually a bad person?” Callie asks. She asks Jeff if Shauna has ever mentioned crossing paths with two frog scientists. Callie has clearly been doing a lot of citizen detective work of her own. Jeff’s reaction suggests he does already know all this. I mean, it’s reasonable to assume Shauna would have written about this in her journal, right?
Shauna arrives at her destination and slowly extracts a brand new hunting knife as “Blood Bitch” by Cocteau Twins kicks in.
I mean…what an episode! The Yellowjackets have been really keeping me on my toes this season in the most fun way imaginable. The thrills of this episode are absolutely bonkers, and the characters are behaving so wildly, but it still ultimately tracks with who they are and the journeys they’ve been on this season. Like the frogs of the fable, the Yellowjackets have over-invested in the idea of governance and leadership. All of their ruinous actions with Ben have led to this moment of them not just fumbling their chance at a rescue but actively destroying it — in Lottie’s case, killing it. The frogs were sent the king they asked for, and they suffered death as a result. Whether it’s giving too much power to Lottie’s visions or giving too much power to someone on a rage rampage like Shauna, the group is actively harming themselves by choosing these societal structures that mimic the outside world instead of truly coming together. They treat the big chase of this episode every bit as seriously as they treat the game of soccer or the bone game from earlier this season, only with this turn of the wheel, it’s much scarier.
The arrival of outside people to the wilderness further reiterates just how distant the Yellowjackets have become from the previous versions of themselves. Violence has become second nature to them. The relentlessly high intensity cadence of the episode makes for a thrilling experience, and every second of this season seems to be inching us closer to the haunting tone of the series’ opening scene.
I know some people have been struggling with the characterization of Teen Shauna as a bloodthirsty rage monster, but it has honestly been one of my favorite parts of the season. I do see the two Shauna arcs in each timeline as being very aligned, and this episode is a great example of that. In both, Shauna wants to go rogue and ignore group consensus in order to enact violence as a way of “solving” her problems. Teen Shauna wants to kill the frog crew under the assumption a rescue party sent for them will find them instead. No witnesses. Adult Shauna wants to solve the mystery of who has supposedly been targeting her with a hunting knife. Every time, she chooses self-preservation over survival. Every time, her trauma response is to pick up a knife. I didn’t know the group’s actions in the wilderness could get much worse than watching Javi die, but here we are this season, with Ben, with these outsiders who are targeted just for being that. But for as intensely violent as this episode is, in true Yellowjackets fashion we also get more than that, a turn of the wheel to give us some three-person melodrama. Edwin, Hannah, and Kodi (if that is his real name) were just living lives of minor squabbles and sexual tension until they happened across the Yellowjackets. My how fast the wheel can turn.
Last buzz:
- I ended up saying it in the comments last week but meant to work it into the main recap, but Ben’s head on a stake really feels like a reference to the “beast”‘s head on a stake in Lord of the Flies. Much like the beast in the book, our characters have found a vessel to project their own worst instincts onto, not realizing that the beast is actually within.
- Jeff’s emphasis of “poorly furnished” is too good.
- “Late. And rudely.”
- It looked like Tai also found a map of some sort in the tent.
- “I am not family, but we have a very intense trauma bond.”
- Before he’s killed, Edwin seems to recognize who the girls are. I do wonder what kind of media coverage they’ve been receiving. They seem like catnip for the tabloids — high achieving, suburban, mostly white, mostly girls gone missing mysteriously.
- So, I know a lot of us went all in on the outsiders being birders and mapped some bird metaphors onto the narrative, but let’s pivot to frogs!!!! For some reason, the fact of them being FROG scientists is so funny to me? I think just because it’s somehow giving DORK even more than birders. These poor dorks! Plus Kodi, who I’m very entertained by.
